TC SPOTLIGHT 22 • IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE • SEPTEMBER 2015 Human Movement Understanding By Emel Demircan, Dana Kulic, Denny Oetomo, and Mitsuhiro Hayashibe R obotics research has been deeply inspired by humans as a sys- tem—from the design of the an- thropomorphic aspects of manipulators, sensors, and actuators to the way a robot coordinates the motion of its body and the higher-level strategies for realizing complex tasks and interacting with the external environment. In recent years, robotics computational strategies have contributed significantly to the anal- ysis of human motion and manipulation skills. These analyses have led to advance- ments in the field of robotics by enabling human-inspired capabilities in robots and simulated systems as well as biologically inspired techniques for robot learning from observation. Furthermore, these analyses have provided a deeper under- standing of the human body and its mo- tion-generation strategies. Natural human motion is central to many of the technologies we develop in the field of ro- botics. This trend is quite visible from the growing number of papers related to the topic of human movement understand- ing, as shown in Figure 1. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2015.2452171 Date of publication: 11 September 2015 Figure 1. The number of papers related to human motion understanding presented in the last ten years at the technical sessions of the IEEE/Robotics Society of Japan International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) and the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). Number of Papers IROS 2001 ICRA 2002 ICRA 2004 ICRA 2006 IROS 2006 ICRA 2007 IROS 2007 ICRA 2008 IROS 2008 ICRA 2009 IROS 2009 ICRA 2010 IROS 2010 IROS 2011 IROS 2012 ICRA 2012 IROS 2013 ICRA 2013 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0